Chapter Ten: Time Slowly Moves Fast
Photo by Djim Loic on Unsplash
May 18, 2020
Dear Diary,
Prior to the Quarantine, Mondays weren’t entirely all bad. After a long weekend of family togetherness, there was a modicum of relief to be derived from successfully depositing the children at school and leaving them to be safely ensconced in their studies for the next eight hours. Now that I’ve become a governess, Mondays offer no such reprieve.
This particular Monday began, as they are all wont to do, with Mistress Olivia refusing to be rousted from her bed and then refusing to study for her impending dictée. Her steadfast refusal to study for her weekly French spelling test marred the weekend as well, but that’s a topic for another day, Diary.
As I lamented my newfound disdain for Mondays to my mother, she was quick to commiserate and herself remarked that she and my father no longer had any sense of time whatsoever. “They all blend in together, Maya. If it weren’t for our neighbors consistently putting their bins out on the curb the night before trash pickup, we would never know what day of the week it is,” she sheepishly expressed to me over the telephone. There seemed something very luxurious about her problem with time, but I decided it best I keep my mouth shut.
The fact of the matter is that time does move differently now, Diary. It moves so slowly and yet so significantly from each day to day. I am reminded of the age-old platitude extended to me countless times in the children’s early days whenever I would complain about how exhausted I was. “The days are long, but the years are short,” some well-meaning numbskull would tell me. Well, if the children’s infancies flew by, the last two months of quarantine have felt like the experience of several lifetimes and I have all the grey hairs to prove it to boot. Thank god for my wig.
Sincerely,
Maya